A Suicide

A few weeks ago I was at the station working on paperwork when the Corporal running the shift got on the radio and said he had just been flagged down by a woman that said her husband had just shot himself. There were a couple of other officers at the station doing paperwork also. Needless to say we all quit what we were doing and hurried to the Corporals location.

I was the first to arrive. As I pulled up I saw the woman in the back of the Corporal’s car. She was screaming and hollering that her husband was dead and that she wanted out of the car.

The Corporal and I made entry into the house while another officer went to the rear, another officer stayed with the lady. The house was a complete mess. We had to climb over clothes and furniture to get through the front living room. That’s not a very pleasant thing to do when there is possibly an armed person in the house.

Anyway we made it through the house and to a back living room. There he was sitting on a couch, obviously dead. I say obviously dead because there were pieces of his head and brain splattered all over the walls, ceiling and floor. He was holding a shotgun between his legs.

We had dispatch tell the paramedics they could come in. When they came in we told them to watch where they stepped because there were pieces of his skull on the floor. They came in and looked at the guy and hooked up a monitor. They thought they saw a pulse on the monitor. Because their protocol says they will work someone with a pulse they started to work him. The ambulance crew seemed a little overwhelmed by the scene. We had to drag him off of the couch, as we did his head hit the couch. It made a squishy noise kind of like a wet rag hitting something.

One of the paramedics started to put a tube in his mouth. She looked up at us in what appeared to be shock and said she could see the floor. That was about the extent of the work on him. It was determined that his injury was not conducive to life and they stopped working him.

It turns out the man had a history of mental problems and had attempted suicide in the past. He was mad at his recently married daughter over the cost of the wedding. Just before he shot himself he told his wife to go get the daughter, who lived just down the street, because he was tired of being lied to. Then he shot himself.

Crack

The city I work in definitely has a drug problem, but most of what we find is marijuana and methamphetamine. From time to time we find powdered cocaine and ever less often we find crack cocaine. In the last week I have made three arrests for crack cocaine. We certainly have crack in town but not in the quantity of the other drugs.

Monday night, which was the only day I worked last week because I took some time off, I was riding around when I saw a car at a convenience store early in the morning. I ran the plate and saw that its registration expired over a year ago. I figured I would wait for it to leave and make a stop on it.

The car left and I pulled in behind it to stop it. I turned on my overhead lights and it made a quick right turn and pulled against the curb. The way the car turned and pulled against the curb I was expecting someone to get out of the car and run.

Sure enough the front passenger casually got out of the car and started to walk away. I got out and told him to stop and he started to run. He ran into the dark behind two houses. As I rounded a corner between the houses I was surprised to see the man lying on the ground by a trailer. It appeared that he had run into the trailer in the dark. I had a hard time not laughing because he was all laid out on the ground. When he saw my light he sprung up and ran about five steps and fell over a fence just ahead of my reach. When he fell over the fence he fell on his stomach and laid there.

Since he was laying on the fence right where I would land if I jumped I figured I would tell him to stay on the ground or I would tase him. He didn’t stay on the ground and I tried to tase him. The taser did not deploy for some reason and he ran off into the dark. By the time I had the taser secured on my belt and was able to get over the fence he had disappeared into the dark.

I had told my dispatcher I had a person running so other officer’s were converging on the area. I returned to the car I had stopped to make sure the other occupants stayed.

As I went back to the car one of the officers saw the man run across a busy street and behind a building. The other officer located the man hiding behind the building a short time later. He had a substance that appeared to be crack cocaine in a baggy in his pocket. He told the officer that it was candle wax that he was going to sell because he needed gas and food. When the officer tested it for cocaine it came back negative.

While that was going on I was talking to the two female occupants of the car. It turned out that the driver was the wife of the man that had run. She lied to me about that at first. When we searched the car we found some more of what appeared to be crack in an area accessible to both the driver and the male. This tested positive.

In the end the driver and the male went to jail for possessing the crack. The male was also charged with evading detention and several warrants including one for revocation of probation on a cocaine charge. I guess he didn’t learn after his first arrest that he can’t have cocaine.

A Foot Chase

Friday night I was working with a partner. We were looking for something to get into when we saw two guys in a dark area near some cars in the general area where there have been car burglaries. When they saw us they started to walk away from the area. We made the block and came back to them.

By the time we made the block they were in a parking lot to a restaurant. As we pulled in the parking lot my partner yelled at them out the window to stop. One did, the other looked at us and kept walking. My partner yelled at him again as I started to get out of the car. I was expecting him to run.

He did. I chased after him on foot as my partner followed in the car. We went about a block, turned and went about another block made a circle around a house and started to go back where we had started.

He had a good jump on me but I had been steadily gaining on him. We jumped a curb and I tased him. I stumbled over the curb and fell on my stomach as I deployed the taser. I looked up and saw that I had hit him with the taser and that he was falling towards me. I quickly jumped up and out of the way.

By this time my partner arrived and took him into custody. He did not like being tased. I don't blame him, it hurts.